SELF-INCARCERATION

How Australians became the architects of their own captivity

The penal colony never ended.

We simply became our own jailers.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is a circular prison where guards could watch every inmate without being seen. And it has been perfect by us Aussies. So well that we don’t need guards anymore. We guard ourselves. We watch each other. We report each other. We compete for the title of Most Compliant Prisoner, and we’re grateful for the opportunity.

Part 1: The Prison We Chose

My neighbour called the council on me last month because my fence was 3 centimetres too high. He didn’t knock on my door. He went straight to the authorities, and he was proud of this. Beaming, as though he’d performed some civic duty.

This is Australia.

A nation of snitches, dobbers, narks. Everyone’s watching everyone else, desperate to catch them in breach of some rule nobody can understand but everyone must follow. Tall poppy syndrome meets convict syndrome. We hate to see anyone get ahead, and we love to see the State put them back in their place.

Australia was founded as a penal colony. Britain’s dumping ground for thieves, rebels, political dissidents. They shipped us here in chains, and we never took them off. We just got more comfortable wearing them. We forged new ones. Heavier ones.

The British prisoners who arrived in 1788 lived under constant surveillance by guards who existed solely to ensure compliance. Everything controlled, monitored, restricted. Permission needed for every activity.

What’s changed?

Part 2: Disarmed and Defenceless

In 1996, Australia gave up its guns. Port Arthur happened, and within days the government implemented one of the most comprehensive gun confiscations in modern history. Australians complied. Happily. Proudly. They congratulated themselves on being so civilised, so much better than those barbaric Americans.

But the Second Amendment exists to protect the First Amendment. The right to bear arms exists to protect the right to free speech. What good is freedom of expression if you have no means to defend it when the State tries to take it away?

Australia has neither amendment. No constitutional guarantee of free speech. No means to defend ourselves against government tyranny. This is not a democracy—not by any meaningful definition. Because a democracy requires the people to have some mechanism to resist an overreaching government.

We have no such mechanism. We are completely defenceless against the State.

And we chose this. We voted for this. We demanded this.

Who protects you from the protector?

Part 3: The American Viceroy

Julie Inman Grant is the eSafety Commissioner. She wields enormous power over what Australians can see, read, say, think. She can remove content from the internet, fine platforms, prosecute individuals for wrongthink disguised as “online safety violations.”

She’s American.

She worked for Twitter, Microsoft, Adobe. Now she’s the arbiter of acceptable speech in Australia. Essentially a CIA plant who determines what Australians are permitted to know and discuss. Misinformation, they call it. Harmful content. Dangerous ideas.

And Australians love her.

They cheer as she bans content, silences dissent, prosecutes people for sharing news articles. Because safety. Because we must be protected from dangerous ideas. Because we can’t be trusted to think for ourselves.

The eSafety Commission is Australia’s Ministry of Truth, but nobody notices because it’s wrapped in therapeutic language. We don’t have censorship, we have “safety.” We don’t have propaganda, we have “fact-checking.” We don’t have totalitarianism, we have “community standards.”

Orwell understood that controlling language controls thought. But even he didn’t predict how willingly people would embrace their own oppression when it came gift-wrapped in compassion.

Part 4: Crisis Manufacturing

Every crisis is an opportunity. The government knows this. They manufacture crises, or exploit them, or both. And each time the people surrender more power in exchange for the illusion of safety.

COVID was the masterclass.

They locked us in our homes for months. Closed businesses, destroyed livelihoods, separated families. Mandated medical procedures. Required digital check-ins, creating a database of our movements. Arrested people for Facebook posts. Shot protestors with rubber bullets. Imposed curfews, restricted travel, controlled every aspect of our lives.

And Australians complied.

Not only complied, they demanded harsher restrictions! They reported neighbours for having visitors. They shamed anyone who questioned the narrative. They formed voluntary surveillance networks, dobbing in anyone who dared go to the beach, sit on a park bench, exercise for more than one hour.

The State didn’t need to force compliance. The prisoners enforced the rules themselves.

Daniel Andrews became a dictator, and Victorians thanked him for it. Re-elected him. Because daddy was keeping them safe.

Climate change. Terrorism. Misinformation. Pandemics. Online safety. Each crisis becomes justification for more control, more surveillance, more restriction. And each time, Australians beg for it.

“Please, keep us safe, Daddy!”

Part 5: The Taxation Fetish

Australians have a peculiar relationship with taxation. They love it. And they love making others pay more of it.

Income tax, capital gains tax, land tax, stamp duty, council rates, GST, fuel excise, alcohol excise, luxury car tax, Medicare levy. Every time you move, earn, buy, sell, or exist, the government takes a cut.

And Australians think this is good.

They campaign for higher taxes. Vote for parties that promise to increase taxation. Shame anyone who suggests a 50%+ effective tax rate might be excessive.

But taxation is just extortion with paperwork. The price you pay the mob for permission to exist in their territory. And the Australian government doesn’t even pretend to use it efficiently. Business class flights to climate conferences. Pay rises during recessions. Programs nobody asked for, regulations nobody understands.

Our American cousins fought a revolution over 3% tax on tea. Australians watch the ATO destroy small businesses over debts a fraction of a politician’s travel budget, and they cheer.

The prisoner doesn’t question the terms of his sentence.

Part 6: Stockholm Syndrome at Scale

We have no freedom of speech, but we’re proud of that. It means we’re civilised, we say.

We have no means to defend ourselves, but we’re proud of that too. It means we’re peaceful.

We have a foreign operative controlling our speech, but that’s fine. She’s keeping us safe.

We have unaffordable housing, but that’s good. GDP is up. Never mind the per capita recession. Never mind young people will never own homes.

We’re taxed into poverty, regulated into stagnation, but that’s our civic duty. That’s for our safety.

This is not normal. This is the psychology of an abused spouse, a cult member, a prisoner so institutionalised that freedom frightens him more than captivity.

We’ve built our own prison and we’re proud of it. We’re both guard and inmate, and we can’t see it as a prison anymore because we’ve been lobotomised by propaganda, by comfort, by the narcotic of safety.

Part 7: The Archipelago

Australia is not one prison. It’s an archipelago of prisons.

Your phone tracks your location. Your bank monitors your purchases. Your social media records your thoughts. Your workplace demands compliance. Your neighbours watch your fence height. Your government controls your speech.

And all of it is voluntary. All of it is welcomed. All of it is considered normal.

We’ve created a totalitarian surveillance state that the people actively maintain and defend. We’ve built a prison with no walls that nobody wants to escape from.

Perhaps that’s Australia’s greatest accomplishment. Proving that you don’t need chains to enslave a population.

You just need to convince them that their chains are for their own good.

The penal colony never ended. We just stopped noticing the bars.

Afterword

I write this knowing it might disappear from the internet, that I might face consequences for noticing out loud what we’ve become.

Australia is not a free country. It never was, and it’s getting less free by the day. We are subjects, not citizens. Prisoners, not people. And we’re content with this. We’ve been trained to love our servitude, to defend our captivity, to police our fellow inmates.

The prisoner who doesn’t know he’s in prison is the most successfully imprisoned of all.

And Australia is full of successful prisoners.

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Reminder - My Book is Out Now.

I want to quickly tell you that my book is available for purchase in hard cover and paperback.

It is called Life in the People’s Republic of Victoria, I am very happy with how this book turned out. It is beautifully printed with high quality materials. I took extra time with the design of this one, and I’m glad I did. There are also some fun surprises inside (but I won’t ruin those).

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